Pages

17 September 2013

This is a new thought I have had so please bear with me as it is still in the process of completely forming in my head. (The brain is a bit slow at the moment, so much going on IRL - ie outside adopto-land).

The discussions about infertility and adoption of late have given me a lot to mull over.

After posting my previous blog and receiving a comment on it, something clicked for me and that is there is an extreme amount of imbalance in how "responsibility" is placed in adoption.

The discussions regarding the "misplacing of blame on adoptive parents" etc has made me question why people view calling people to account for themselves in that way is so terrible when really all I am doing is redefining boundaries and lines that should never have been blurred in the first place and trying to find a balance between all parties involved.

In this world, we have this desire to 'fix' things. To make neat and tidy packages out of situations we feel are messy. And infertility is one of those situations. It is messy in that it involves pain, heartbreak and loss. It isn't something society is comfortable sitting with because we know there isn't really a proper solution for it - ie we cannot make an infertile person fertile again although I am sure it has been tried. So society 'we' searches for the next best thing. Ahh, a young woman who is facing an unplanned pregnancy. Who better? Society deems her as not in a place to raise her child and so the two parties are pitted together to create a "neat" and "tidy" package. Mother has baby, goes on with her life (supposedly, at least that is what society wants her to do) and the couple suffering infertility have a baby. 'Problem' solved! Society breathes a sigh of relief and moves on.

BUT and this is a really huge BUT... it DOES NOT work.

In doing this, the responsibility of "fixing" an issue that actually CANNOT be fixed, ever, is placed on the shoulders of women in their most vulnerable time and also onto their children. And in this, society absolves these couples suffering of ALL responsibility, making allowances for them, and giving them what they want because this situation must remain 'neat and tidy' at all costs.

In my previous post I linked Claudia's recent blog which raised a phenomenal amount of comments. Over 300! In these comments, those fighting adoption and calling sufferers with infertility to account for their own pain, we were compared to the KKK, Mein Kamf and racists. However when mothers of adoption loss or adult adoptees quote passages about injustice from Martin Luther King for example and talk about human rights violations we get slammed from EVERYWHERE. We are not allowed to speak up. Our voices are stomped on by society in general because by speaking out and drawing attention to the fact the "neat" and "tidy" solution actually has caused a bigger mess and is NOT a solution, it places responsibility back onto society and they really don't want that. Because it forces them to accept there are things in life that simply cannot ever be fixed.

Calling people to account or to own their pain is not actually being nasty. It is not being mean. It is doing something sufferers of all different traumas are asked to do the world over. It is not saying they have "to get over it". NO WAY! But it is saying they need to recognise their are boundaries to how we relate to people even when we suffer. We cannot use our pain as an excuse to go out and cause harm. And regardless of where you sit with adoption, making allowances for couples with infertility to cause an unnecessary separation between a mother and her baby, is allowing them to use their pain to cause harm. It is allowing that pain to spill over from their lives and into the lives of a stranger's family. That isn't okay. It is wrong. And this needs to be recognised and understood by those pushing couples to adopt instead of helping them learn to live with their pain. Rather than creating a demand for unavailable infants, rather than asking couples to shift their personal responsibilities onto the shoulders of someone in a vulnerable position, there needs to be recognition that infertility causes untold pain and heartache and there is NO fix for that. Even adoption is not really a fix, merely a distraction, but it doesn't fix infertility.

Just as I was sitting down to write this and was checking Facebook as I often do, a blog post written by Adoptive mom Margie popped up and so I headed over to read it. I really appreciate this post she has written and it raises some more very interesting points. Head over and have a read as I feel this issue is so much more than infertility vs fertility... adoptive parents vs natural parents. You can find it here.

I am going to leave this here for now. Like I said, this is still part of a long thought process that is going on in my head so I may pick this up again some other time. In the meantime, I will end here.

About Me

My name is Myst and I am the mother of three children, one whom I lost to forced adoption in New Zealand in 1998. I use this blog to share my story so others may be better informed of adoption practises in New Zealand and not lose their child in the same way I did.

Some quotes I love...

"This story had its beginnings in a wrongful belief that women could be separated from their babies and it would all be for the best. Instead, these churches and charities, families, medical staff and bureaucrats struck at the most primal and sacred bond there is - the bond between a mother and her baby"

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart, you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things time cannot mend, some hurts that go to deep... that have taken hold."- Frodo, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

“Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologise for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you are right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.”-Gandhi

“Man has the capacity to pass on from generation to generation the wrongs that he has suffered whether they are overt or covert wrongs. And there is a whole generation of people who have suffered from the inhumanity of our social service system because they were poor, because they were helpless, because they were young, because they had no advocates, because they were treated unjustly, because they were treated as though they had wronged people by having a child. We now have to call those social service systems to task.”- Family Involvement ‘Editorial’ John L. Brown No 5 (1977):1

"Regrettably, in many cases, the emphasis has changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of providing a needy parent with a child. As a result, a whole industry has grown, generating millions of dollars of revenue each year..."- Commission on Human Rights, resolution 2002/92; E/CN/2002/79; page 25

"Hope is like a bird that senses dawn and carefully starts to sing while it is still dark."- Author unknown

“When a baby is born, a mother is born”-Adapted from a quote by Alice Meynell

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“A mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on.”-Washington Irving

“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”-Amnesty International

“There is in this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong deathless love save that within a mother’s heart.”-Felicia D. Hemans

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."-Dale Carnegie

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”Psalm 139:13, 14

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. “-Anne Lamott

“No language can express the power and beauty and heroism and majesty of a mother’s love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven.”-E.H. Chapin